lunes, junio 07, 2010

Esto lo estoy tocando mañana #8 - Lennie Tristano (1956)

Miles Davis is often associated with the late-1940s jazz that came to be known as The Birth of the Cool. But the blind Chicago pianist Lennie Tristano was just as significant a figure in that seismic shift. Unfortunately, most people outside the jazz loop don't know Tristano's name from a hole in the ground.

This ascetic, irascible and uncompromising genius took the implications of a "cool" jazz style – one that concentrated on quiet delivery, oblique effects, suppressed emotion and avoidance of theatricality – and pushed it to its purest extreme. But although Tristano might have been sidelined for his rejection of such popular jazz calling-cards as the big crescendo, the flashy technical display or the in-your-face swinging blues, he was by no means emotionally remote or cerebral.

Tristano's music was rigorously structured. He told horn players to avoid wailing effects and refine their melodic variation, while drummers were instructed to stick close to a more or less metronomic pulse (the better, in his view, to advance the other muscian's freedom to improvise). But if he was rigorous, his music was nonetheless full of surprises and dry wit, driven by restless curiosity, an argumentative disposition and great musical erudition. Bill Evans, one of the great jazz pianists and a key figure in the thinking behind Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, was a Tristano student.

Born in Chicago on 19 March 1919, Tristano was blind from childhood and first studied piano with his opera singer mother. Between 1928 and 1938 he learned piano, wind instruments and musical theory at a school for the blind. Graduating from Chicago's American Conservatory in 1943, Tristano began teaching privately (the still-active improvising saxophonist Lee Konitz was one of his first pupils) and playing his own advanced notions of bebop in Chicago clubs.

Tristano played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on his move to New York in 1946, began winning jazz magazine polls as a rising star, formed a groundbreaking sextet including Konitz in 1949, was an early explorer of the record producer's arts of overdubbing and speed-changing, and founded the first significant school of jazz in 1951. Its students have included the remarkable tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh and bassist Peter Ind (who was later to move to Britain, founding Hoxton's Bass Clef club in the 1980s).

Tristano increasingly concentrated on spreading his own particular word rather than performing himself, and his awareness of the technical demands of several instruments made him far more flexible than a piano teacher might normally be. But as his proteges flew the nest, Tristano withdrew to Long Island in 1956. His public appearances were rare after that, though many private recordings have been subsequently issued under his daughter's supervision. Many of them indicate a fascination with free-improvised music that anticipates the arrival of Ornette Coleman and other 1960s revolutionaries.